SUPPORTING & LEARNING ICO

After having to discuss the basics on how to exchange your money to digital currency on this post: Are You Ready to Cash-In to Bitcoins? I’ve decided to take another leap and support an ICO to actually experience and learn how it actually works and what it does.

Just as what I always explain, here are ways to get into Bitcoins:

Have your cash exchanged for digital currency

Trade

Invest through an ICO company.

On this post, I’d be fiddling with the curiosity of an Initial Coin Offering, or ICO as we call them. Thanks to two of my good friends for being encouraging, and doing this entire learning with me – Paul Pajo and Carlo Ople.

WHAT IS AN ICO?

The term ICO is abbreviated from the Initial Coin Offering. An ICO basically is like the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the stock market. The difference between the two, however, is that IPO’s are for enlisted traditional companies, and ICO’s are companies or start-ups who revolves around the digital space.

Just like IPO’s, these ICO’s issues tokens (or coins) using the blockchain technology wherein people can buy the tokens, sold, or exchanged for other currencies including real money. These offerings come in phases: Pre-selling for a certain duration of time with incentives and the actual sale.

This ICO strategy is used to raise funds for their company’s product development, support operations, acquisition, marketing, and scalability. As these tokens have been pre-offered, your support raises the overall value of the company, and the support you’ve invested will also rise during the ICO phase.

HOW DO I INVEST AN ICO?

For most of these ICO offerings, Ethereum is their choice of digital currency. Ethereum, is an open software platform based on the blockchain technology with enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications. However, it has to go through the digital currency exchange from Bitcoin to Ethereum.

BTC TO ETH EXCHANGE

Just like having your money exchanged to Bitcoin, having to exchange to Ethereum requires you to go through Bitcoin AND then you make use of an Ethereum wallet to keep the said Ethereum currency.

I personally use Ethereum wallet since it converts your BTC to ETH automatically rather than going through a trading platform. However, it may take few minutes before the transaction shows up. It took about 30 minutes for mines to reflect on the Etherum wallet upon the sent confirmation from the bitcoin wallet.

WHAT ICO’S DO I SUPPORT?

I am still the conservative and safe investor and when I support a certain company, I always look into who are inside the company, read through their whitepaper, ask questions and as much as possible, I always ask for what the company stands out for; what their objectives are, mission and vision.

Also, prior to investing, I also reach out to the Founders to see how approachable they are, how hands-on they truly give to the company, and what have they done prior to ICO pre-selling for us to consider them as worth our investment.

As I am on the quest to learn how ICO’s works after the pre-sale and full-backed up phase, experience how I’ll earn or profit from supporting an ICO.

I’ve chosen to go for SALARIUMand PAWNHERO ‘s HeroToken. Both companies mission and the aim is to make credit more readily available and affordable for the unbanked or underbanked, starting in the Southeast Asia (Hero token) and to make payroll easier and manageable for the company and employees (Salarium).

READ THE FINE PRINT

Before you jump into investing, you’d have to read their whitepapers and if it does seem sound to you. If you’re not quite the reader, talk to them directly and ask them as much information you can and see how they’re progressing.

Here are the whitepapers of the ICO’s I placed in a minimum amount of investment:

Visit their website and check on their pre-sale offering, if you’re lucky. As of writing, both are still on pre-selling momentum. HeroToken is up for another round after being supported more than $2M during the first 90 minutes of ICO offering.

Follow the instructions as they walk you through how to support them with your Ethereum.

REMINDER

When investing and taking part of these ICO’s, please be reminded of the Ethereum wallet you’ve used for them to send back the token after pre-selling. Once you lost your wallet, they are not responsible.

Also, be careful of those quick-money-return scams who promises you a certain percentage after an x number of days. Again, just like stocks, it’s volatile and won’t give you an exact percentage of return on a specific date.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Since all these ICO’s are still on pre-selling. I have yet to know what transpires after. Will keep tabs and update this post. Meanwhile, What ICO have you supported? What do you think of these ICO’s?